Imran Khan

A graduate of Chicago Public Schools, Imran Khan returned to the district and taught for five years at W.R. Harper High School in West Englewood. While serving as English Department Chair, AVID Coordinator, and a member of the school’s Instructional Leadership Team, he was a 2011 Finalist for the Chicago Drive Award, a presenter at the Annual ASCD Conference (the world’s premier education development event), and a Gold Medal Winner for Highest Student Gains in Chicago’s Area 12 for three consecutive years.

In 2010, Imran co-founded Embarc and piloted the program with 100 students, and in 2013, he left the classroom to lead the organization’s growth. Embarc is a three-year program that provides experience-based learning opportunities to low-income high school students to prepare them for college and career success. Embarc’s goal is to drive student success with long-term social and cultural exposure. By engaging school districts, community partners and students, Embarc triggers intrinsic motivation in students, transforms how schools educate, and creates a more aware and integrated society.

Under Imran’s leadership, Embarc has grown in five short years into a highly-demanded, social and cultural education program serving more than 600 students in ten Chicago public high schools spanning the city. Through this growth, Embarc has sustained critical student outcomes, including a 98% high school graduation rate among Embarc students graduating in 2015, an average 89% student attendance rate, and 93% college enrollment. Furthermore, the program has proven a social return on investment of 7:1 (due to the social savings of a high school graduate vs. a high school dropout). As a result of evaluation systems and this proven impact, Embarc have won several competitive grant awards in the past three years, including: A Better Chicago’s Project Impact, Impact 100 Chicago, and Invest For Kids.

Imran Khan And How Embarc Has Changed How Students Control Their Futures

A meritocracy is a place where people believe that, through merit or hard work, one can become successful. In other words, the United States of America. Growing up, I knew I wanted to be the kind of woman that was hard-working, intelligent, and successful because we’re socially conditioned to believe that intelligence, hard-work, and strong-will alone, will get us to where we need to go. However, the harder I work as I go along, the more I understand how sociological factors, that are often out of youth’s control, influence a group’s success. This is where Imran Khan, and his Embarc Chicago, come in to help young people shape their futures in a more hopeful and positive way.

Imran Khan, an almost 40 year old teacher from Englewood’s Harper High School, and the company he created, are revolutionizing how Chicago students learn in classrooms. Through its acknowledgement and tackling of sociological obstacles such as violence, segregation, and institutionalized racism, to name a few, Khan is helping disenfranchised youth find their paths. With research, Embarc has learned that, of the people who benefit from the company, 96% knew and lost someone due to gun violence, 83% come from single-parent homes. Meanwhile, only 8% of these students have a family member that’s graduated from college. Of all these students who are touched by the company, 97% will graduate with Embarc’s guidance.

One of the specific ways that Embarc helps students maximize their potential, is through embarking on journeys with students. These seem like field trips that most students take for granted, and yes the pun in the previous sentence was intended, but the journeys serve an important purpose. For example, students were taken on a journey to grocery stores outside of areas that are typically considered “food deserts” to learn the long-term importance of making healthy nutritional choices, and while learning about the systems that create inaccessibility to healthier options within under-served neighborhoods. Another journey that was taken more recently, was when students were paired up with mentors to better understand the college application process and “high school to college” transition. All in all, these trips and little details that many of today’s youth take for granted, are trips that help widen students’ perspectives and grasp of what accomplishments are within their reach.

Imran Khan is an example of the positive ripple effect we can have on other people’s lives when we look outside of ourselves and into the world around us. Not everything is rosy, and not everything is given to people on merit. Yet, hope is still bred by people like Khan, who identify a problem and then work with others to create solutions. As a man who started out as a teacher for Harper High School in Chicago’s Englewood, which is frequently called one of the “most dangerous” schools in the nation, he has taught in more ways than even he could imagine and to more students than he will ever meet. One of them being me, as I research and write about his accomplishment in helping so many students, and this he has done for students that society frequently chooses to overlook when they struggle.

The success of his students are being recognized in many ways. Other networks within CPS are restructuring skills acquisition and academic intervention in ways that fit the model laid out by Khan. So many more students will benefit from this in coming years. The CPS Office of School Improvement gave him four consecutive awards for highest student achievement, or in other words, his students gave him that award. The TEDxColumbiaCollegeChicago team is excited to receive this DRIVE award finalist and have him speak to our students!

- Camila Isopo Novi